The Forgotten City (25 page)

E
li stepped out of the pipeway and onto a ledge. They’d found a blocked-off water main leading into Adliden and followed it here to the top of the submerged, subterranean level. On one side of the ledge a craggy rock-wall towered above them. On the other side, the ground fell away into a precarious, ninety-degree drop to a fast-flowing river far below. The rushing brown rapids roared, crashing into the rocks and spitting up wet slivers. The air hung lifeless, its salt and seaweed tang leaving an off, bitter taste in Eli’s mouth. He glanced at Ismail.

The scullion hadn’t spoken a word since they’d left Duskmaveth, just stared ahead of them with empty eyes. It was clear, he really didn’t believe he had any hope whatsoever of staying free of the witch and surviving. In his mind, death was the only way to escape. Eli knew he couldn’t just snap his fingers and make Ismail believe in something different, his thoughts long entrenched and reinforced by torture and imprisonment – all he could do was try to keep him moving. Eli forced himself to focus on the plan – get to Nineva, get the portal, go to Omar Montanya, rescue Silho, the commander and Diega, return with some Omarian blood and heal Jude … There were so many holes in the plan it might as well have been a colander, but he chose not to think about that.

They followed the ledge downward to a path that ran beside the river, its muddied sandbank melting into the waters and slowing the flow. The stiller parts of the stream were full of marine-breeds – tuskfish, sandfish, twohand fish, wibbling-wobbling jelly boulderfish that plonked into the water to hide. Flocks of gliding rainbow coralangels hovered over heavily whiskered cats with fur and scales, batting at tiny butterfly fish flittering past on delicate wings. On the opposite side of the river, crustaceans squatted on the bank, sifting through the sand with clamp-like claw hands. Thick, orange shells covered their skin and their eyes sat on stalks on the top of their heads. They looked up sharply as the strangers approached. Some leaped onto two legs and darted into burrows in the sand, immediately sealing them over. Others just stared with their stalked black eyes. One clicked its pincers together in a
snip-click
sound. The message was clear enough –
stay away
.

“Is it just me, or does everyone seem a little unfriendly here?” Eli said to Ismail.

“The war’s touched them too,” the scullion muttered grimly. He fixed his stare on Eli. “Machine-breeds against the gangsters?”

During the flight there, Eli had recounted more of the recent civil war that had brought the city to the brink.

“Yes,” Eli said, surprised and encouraged by the fact Ismail was asking a question. “Kry against Caesar K-Ruz.”

“It was only a matter of time,” Ismail said. “Before the machine-breeds revolted.”

“Maybe I’m naive,” Eli replied. “But I can’t understand how such a powerful group like the machine-breeds could have been oppressed so much in the first place … They have strengths like rapid healing and resistance to magics that no other race has … I mean, I know the historical account of the situation, but it just doesn’t seem plausible.”

“That’s because it’s the
official
historical account, written by the oppressors,” Ismail said, some feeling coming into his voice. “It’s not the actual account. You don’t need to do much to control someone stronger than you – you just need to know what their weakness is and be ruthless in exploiting it. The real story was that the Ar Antarians began to take control after they stole a group of children whose parents were influential Androt leaders. Then they used simple threat to manipulate the parents and turn the race against itself. The machine-breeds never recovered after that.”

“I’ve never heard that before,” Eli said. “But it does ring true.”

“You think scullions allowed the governments to write their history for them. We wrote our own history! Not that any of it actually matters,” Ismail said, and Eli saw a momentary flicker of emotion in his eyes.

“Where were you born? Was it in the city or in the scullion settlements?” Eli asked, trying to encourage him to keep talking. Ev’r hadn’t written anything about Ismail’s earlier life in her journal, just documenting from the start of their relationship when Ev’r was twelve and he fifteen. They were actually cousins, third or fourth removed, which was why they had the same last name.

“My background is irrelevant to the mission,” Ismail responded. “I suggest you focus, soldier.”

“Well, to be honest, I’ve never been much good at focusing on one thing,” Eli said. “Me – I was born in the back of a transflyer. My father was going to take my mother away to some place where they could live together, but then I was born early and he took one look at me and changed his mind! My grandparents raised me.”

Ismail grunted, eyeing Eli’s mixed Glee and Greer bloodline marks on his arms, blue stripes and purple dots.

“I noticed that you had two fathers – were you close to either of them or your mum?” Eli pressed him again.

“As I said, my background is irrelevant,” Ismail answered.

Eli took that as a no and said, “I never got to know mine either really. I saw Mum once or twice when she came to ask my grandparents for money, but then she married some rich guy and never visited again. Dad … he was kind of in the picture for a moment there, but not really. Kind of hurt a bit,” he admitted.

Ismail gave him a hard stare and said, “Do you know what happens to Militia recruits who bring up their past?”

“No, but I can imagine it’s not pleasant.”

“They’re shot. Dead. On the spot,” Ismail said, flatly. “There is no past. There is no future. There is only the mission.”

Eli absorbed the information with dulled horror and decided to restrain his normal imp-breed urges and stop before he had an electrifier to his head. Hunger snarled inside him, gnawing at his stomach. He grabbed some supplies off his belt. A packet of dried fruit and some energy bars. He opened one pack and started to offer it to Ismail. The scullion whipped around instantly, his eyes shining red, a savage, wolf-like expression on his face. The beast had surfaced.

Eli had seen that look on the packs of starving dogs that roamed the scullion settlements just outside the city walls. He used to go there and throw them bones and meat cast-offs, which the cooks at the United Regiment cafeteria would put aside for him. Without hesitating, he threw all the food away from him onto the ground. Ismail lunged at it, dropping to all fours and furiously tearing open the packets. He shoved the food into his mouth, swallowing almost without chewing. After he’d finished it all, he grimaced and threw everything back up. After only the slightest of pauses, he started eating the vomit.

“No!” Eli called out despite his better judgement not to get between a hungry wolf and his meal. “Soldier – stop – desist!”

Ismail jolted. He straightened up to his knee and stared down at his vomit-covered hands. His face was blank again as he switched back to the soldier.

Eli crouched down where he stood so that they were on the same eye-level.

“It’s okay.” He stayed crouching and shuffled toward Ismail at a cautious pace, until he was close enough to hand the scullion a wipe from his belt. Ismail accepted it and cleaned off the sick, then Eli took his flask off his belt and poured some anti-nausea serum into it. He handed it to Ismail and said, “Sip it, it’ll help settle your stomach.”

Ismail first sniffed at the flask, then snatched at it and gulped the contents down, unable to consume anything slowly at this stage. Eli kicked himself for not foreseeing the reaction. Ismail looked so healthy now, thanks to the healing formulas, that he’d completely forgotten not long ago he was eating raw meat and dirt just to stay alive.

Ismail finished the whole flask and then handed it back. They both stood up and Ismail’s eyes were so vacant and staring that Eli wondered if he’d completely retreated into shock.

“Are you okay?” he asked him.

“Confirmed.” Ismail responded. “Proceed.” He turned, walking in a trudging, mechanical way – but moving nonetheless.

They followed the path back up a slight slope, walking for some time until they reached a heavy tarnished metal door blocking their way. Rust smothered its hinges and there was an inscription carved in the rock above the frame – one word –
Talak.

“The marine-breed god of the waters,” Eli murmured.

He checked his navigation. It looked as if this door was the only way to get down to the lower parts of the level where the painting was located, in the amphibious city, Nineva.

“Do you think it’s just water behind there?” he asked, envisioning opening the door and being swept away by a torrential current. Ismail put his ear to the door and listened.

“No, it’s hollow,” he said. He grabbed the rusted turn-circle and started wrenching it down. A few big turns later, the door screeched open. A gust of air smelling of warm salt water wafted out.

Ismail armed his electrifier and stepped over the threshold down into shin-high water, and Eli followed, the water level significantly higher on him. A dim light shone up ahead and they waded toward it, their splashes echoing through the tunnel. Soon they came to the source of the glow. Someone had cut out a section of rock and replaced it with glass. Behind that, a strange marine-breed creature hung suspended, completely still as though frozen, in light blue water. There was something written on a plaque, mottled with age, fixed under the window. Eli narrowed his eyes and ran a hand over the words, chipping away some of the rust so he could read them.

“
Trak Hrak Racktak
,” he said aloud. “Marine-breed language – I’ve got a translator.”

Eli reached for it, but Ismail said, “If you trespass …”

“If you trespass …?” Eli prompted.

“That’s all it says.”

The scullion pointed and Eli turned to see another light up ahead. They moved through the water toward it and found a second glass window with a creature behind it. This one had oversized red eyes and a gaping grouper mouth, its face covered in long, green, tentacle-like whiskers. The scaled body extended out behind it like a whale.

It also had a plaque that Eli read: “
Mrak Splak Racktrak
.”

“If you trespass in these waters.” Ismail put the two together.

“There’s another one,” Eli said. He waded up to the third circle of light, noticing the ground under their feet starting to change from firm rock to a spongy moss. He peered down into the turbid swill below them, but couldn’t see anything. They stopped at the light. A creature stared out from behind the glass. It had a long shark-like head and small gray eyes with black pupils. Its body looked like a human-breed’s, except its hands were sharp knife-like fins and the flipper feet pointed outward. There were five lines in its neck – gills.

“No writing.” Eli leaned forward and as he did, movement caught his eye. The gills of the creature had expanded.

“It’s alive.” he said.

As the words left his mouth, the creature lashed out, cutting through the glass and slashing toward Eli’s neck.

He just managed to leap aside before it struck. Water dribbled from the fractured glass and it started to split in more places. The ground trembled.

“They’re underneath us!” Ismail fired his electrifier into the water, but a fin-hand darted up and slapped the weapon away.

“Run!” Eli yelled. He buzzed his wings and shot forward as a knife-like fin stabbed upward right where he had been standing.

As they fled, the shark creatures rose from underneath their feet, slashing with razor fins and sending high-low calls echoing through the tunnel. They gave chase, moving with rocking, lunging steps, seemingly awkward, but surprisingly fast and agile. Ismail swerved and leaped, trying to dodge the fins. One stabbed up through his lower leg and he yelled, ripping the Morsus Ictus off his belt and slashing down with it, severing the creature’s limb. Another door appeared up ahead and Ismail charged it, hitting it with so much force that it flew open.

They ran out onto a ledge and skidded to a stop in front of a dead-end. A wall towered forever up in front and beside them, made of smoothed white coral with no footholds to climb. On the other side was the steep drop to the river below. They heard a roar behind them and turned to see a wave of water racing down the tunnel, collecting up the sharks and speeding toward them. The glass had given out.

There was only one way to go.

“Down!” Ismail commanded and jumped off the ledge. Eli half-flew and half-skidded down the slope behind him in a storm of mud and sand. They hit the ground and rolled a few times to the edge of the rushing river. On the ledge above, the creatures had reached the end of the tunnel and were waterfalling down the drop in one gray-white mass.

Eli and Ismail exchanged a glance, then both plunged into the river. A speeding rip swept them away, dunking and pummeling them. Eli gasped, fighting to keep his head above the water, his wings too wet to fly. He looked back and saw fins pursuing them. Ismail swam powerfully, grabbing Eli aside just before he crashed into a boulder.

“I forgot!” Eli yelled above the roar of the river. “You have shark blood. Can you talk to them?”

Ismail shook his head. “They’re not listening. They’re too hungry. I could send out an electro pulse that will stun them, but it will take me out as well.”

Eli spat out a mouthful of briny water and said, “No. Plan B?”

“I can feel something else swimming through the water …” Ismail told him.

“Something that won’t eat us?” Eli said hopefully.

As the sharks closed in, Ismail started whistling, and after a few moments, a head popped out of the water right beside Eli. It had a yellow face with a long equine snout, a spiky mane and round orange eyes, ink spot pupils in the center. More of the same type of creature emerged, swimming alongside them, changing color from a warning neon yellow to a friendlier brown with black stripes. One of them whinnied and Eli yelled, “Seahorses!”

“Grab one!” Ismail shouted. “Quick, before they run!”